Highlights from Devoxx 2022

From April 20-22, I attended the Devoxx 2022 conference in Paris. The conference offers, over 3 days, more than 240 presentations, practical workshops, as well as multiple opportunities to meet a very active community of developers around themes like Java, Kubernetes, OAUTH 2.1,  IA, CI/CD and more.

Following the conference, I caught up with Romain Tellier and Michaël Lefèvre, both Software Engineers at Antidot/Fluid Topics and here is what the three of us had to say about it.

Michaël

This is actually my second time at Devoxx after the 2017 edition. I feel like I had a different perspective this time around as I’m a bit more senior in my role.

My favourite conference was definitely Doctolib needs a more powerful database. Ok, but which one? by Bertrand Paquet, Senior Site Reliability Engineer and David Gageot, Chief Architect at Doctolib. They discussed how they operate one of the largest transactional databases in Europe (and plan to grow even further) and how they are close to the physical limitations of Aurora (PostgreSQL managed by AWS). But despite these limitations, they insist on wanting to keep a “boring” architecture with one database and one way to code.

Make sure to watch the replay!

I attended a very practical session on the common pitfalls one might encounter when using Kafka. The speakers explored these pitfalls from a developer’s point of view then from the operations’ point of view. It’s definitely a talk worth listening to if you plan to use Kafka, or if you’re looking for optimization in your current usage.

Finally, I attended the “Senior Developer with 6 years of experience, what’s next?” session. The conference touched on a recurring topic in IT: when you’re a senior developer, what can you expect of your career? Do you need to become a manager or are there other steps you can take to keep your career moving forward. I very much enjoyed the conference and got really interesting tips!

Romain

Devoxx 2022 was my first developer conference. I’ve been at Antidot/Fluid Topics for four years now but with the pandemic, I didn’t really get the chance to attend any in-person conference.

I attended various talks on front-end web development, two of which stood out:

• Art & Entropy: Chaos engineering for the front-end by Thibaud Courtoison, Engineering Manager at October. The conference explored the notion of chaos engineering, but not from a back-end perspective, from a front-end one. Thibaud shared best practices and gave us access to a set of tools he designed to break web apps, and find ways to improve them.
• The (dis)love of web testing by Florent Le Gall, Software Engineer and Paola Ducolin, Senior Software Engineer at Datadog,Inc. The speakers questioned the front-end test pyramid. They delved into the “testing library” which emphasizes the relationship between web testing and accessibility. They strongly advised using ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) in order to create a virtuous circle where accessibility is useful to testing and testing increases product accessibility.

I was eager to attend Devoxx to see if I could find solutions to test the visual regression of web components. I managed to discuss this concept with several attendees but couldn’t really identify any convenient solution. All in all, it was still a great conference.

My feedbacks

The Devoxx 2022 edition was insightful. I realized how lucky we were at Antidot/Fluid Topics to work with the latest technologies.

I personally enjoyed the “University” session on “Zero Trust: the new normal“ by Laurent Grangeau, Solution Architect at Google and Tony Jarriault, Solution Architect at Capgemini. They explored how with the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations’ remote work infrastructure have been required to focus on certain security elements. It’s been a focal point for us as well!

I attended “How OpenTelemetry can transform your monitoring by unifying your logs/metrics/traces“. The speakers discussed the use of OpenTelemetry Collector at Ubisoft. I learned a lot from Vincent Behar.

But let’s face it, Devoxx is not just about the conferences!

• I got to meet the Niptech Podcast team. I’ve been listening to them for over 10 years
• I met the Commit Strip authors who signed my albums
• I saw part of the Fluid Topics’ dev team, in person! We usually chat over Zoom!

Devoxx is really one of the top developer conferences in France. In the past, I’ve had the opportunity to speak at Devoxx and I definitely look forward to the next time.